Nominal groups can function as subjects, complements or objects of prepositions.

Subject:

A more detailed life of Lord Reading, Liberal leader in the House of Lords and an important actor in the events of 1931,would be of great value.

Complement:

There are plans to extract a much greater harvest from the timber resource.

Object of preposition:

The information very properly reached the files of the survey for antimalarial compounds under the Survey Number SN-183.

A nominal group can also be qualified by another nominal group in apposition.

Dr. Maurice Aumont, the Director of the Berlitz School at Bordeaux, looked after him in an efficient and kindly way.

The first National Government, the government which forms the focal point of most historical writing on the crisis, followed the collapse of the Labour government in August 1931.

Sir Shridath Ramphal,former Secretary-General of the Commonwealth,addressed the close connection between environmental protection and economic-development issues of critical importance for developing countries.

Examples

The exception is David Marquand's splendid biography of Ramsay MacDonald.

Meanwhile, in 1942 another committee was working onBritain's postwar civil aviation policy.

More Examples

Many of the suggested benefits of group livinghave been concerned with avoiding being eaten by predators.

French is also spoken bya large number of the African immigrants in the UK.

This chapter is a brief distillation ofa few of the themes in that book.

In the United States, most of the outstanding men who first made their name in the amateur gameturned professional.

While the ozone hole has been considered a solved problem, we are now finding it has caused a great deal of the climate change that has been observed.

Exercise

Read the following text. Notice how the word "need" is used. Notice how it is modified (premodified and postmodified) and how the nominal group it is the head of functions in the clause.

The fundamental human need to belong comes from the desire to associate with others, to cooperate, to accept group norms. However, the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) shows that the need to belong can also be perverted into excessive conformity, compliance, and in-group versus out-group hostility. The need for autonomy and control, the central forces toward self-direction and planning, can be perverted into an excessive exercise of power to dominate others or into learned helplessness.

Consider three more such needs that can cut both ways. First, needs for consistency and rationality give meaningful and wise direction to our lives. Yet dissonant commitments force us to honor and rationalize wrong-headed decisions, such as prisoners remaining when they should have quit and guards justifying their abuse. Second, needs to know and to understand our environment and our relationship to it lead to curiosity, scientific discovery, philosophy, the humanities, and art. But a capricious, arbitrary environment that does not make sense can pervert those basic needs and lead to frustration and self-isolation (as it did in our prisoners). And finally, our need for stimulation triggers explorations and adventurous risk taking, but it can also make us vulnerable to boredom when we are placed in a static setting. Boredom, in turn, can become a powerful motivator of actions as we saw with the SPE night shift guards to have fun with their "playthings."